The invention relates to the field of communications systems and, more specifically, to managing related data respectively stored in a plurality of databases in a network management system.
It is often the case that related data may be stored in different databases. For example, a bank may store related data such as account information, credit history, customer data, etc., in different databases. It can be appreciated that over time related data associated with a particular account (i.e., a customer) may become inconsistent across the different databases. As such, when data associated with the account is selected by a particular banking application from one of the databases and processed, the end result may be incorrect because the selected data is not consistent with its associated data stored in the other databases.
As another example, in a telecommunications application, different data that is related in some way, e.g., facility, provisioning and maintenance data, may be stored in different databases. If a person enters a subscription for telephone services, the facilities to implement the subscription are selected from a provisioning database. However, the selected facilities may not actually be available. The reason for this may be, for example, that the facilities were marked unavailable due to maintenance activity and shown as such in a maintenance database, but were inadvertently left marked as available in the provisioning database. As such, a user would be unsuccessful in implementing the requested service as a result of trying to use facilities that were not available.
Currently, updates of database changes are done at set intervals such as at night globally, to specific tables and/or to parameters when the databases become inaccessible to users. Unfortunately, if a user were to access the respective database containing the database record before the update of the respective database, inconsistent data will be retrieved.
The invention comprises a method and apparatus for reducing inconsistencies between databases supporting the operation of a large telecommunications network.
Specifically, a method of synchronizing databases containing related information, comprising the steps of detecting a change to at least one database record in any of a first plurality of databases based on a first set of parameters; notifying a controller of the change; and updating, according to the detected change, each of a second plurality of databases containing the respective database record in response to a determination that the change falls within a second parameter.